hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

At this point we know the main character consciousness is unreliable, the third circuit is already taking over and the main conscious is creating false memories to bridge the two. The glowing skull part happened in the middle of the night and is not mentioned afterwards. It is possible that while the main character is freezed the skull will continue glowing, and through it he will be able to feel the real librarian heart and 'build' in his subconscious a more real librarian, a person with her own feelings (heart) and not just a projection of his own subconscious.Īnother possibility though, is that this is just another cope of the subconscious. When it starts glowing and the real life librarian touches it, the dream reader is able to feel her heart from the skulls in the end of the world. In the end I think this object is a lot more important than the old guy says: it's probably built so that it resonates at particular frequencies and acts as a link between 'wonderland' and 'the end of the world'. When it was revealed it was just a simple replica I thought it was a huge letdown and that it didn't make a lot of sense. Otherwise he would've probably gone crazy knowing he was actually stuck in his own head for ever.Īnother interesting point is the unicorn skull. To cope with this contradiction the subconscious just created the illusion of a possible excape and the illusion of free will. Unless you specifically trained for that (lucid dreaming), realizing you're dreaming is traumatic for the brain, it can't keep up with the simulation and forces you to wake up. The dream reader and his shadow already realized the world was fake and that all the people there were empty (just a product of the subconscious). I think that finally finding an escape was just a way of the subconsious to cope with the situation: 'there is an exit, I just decided to stay here on my will'.

As we know the main character peculiarity is that his subconscious is incredibly consistent and this allowed him to survive the operation, while the others' brain shut down because they couldn't cope with the contradictions. My theory is that this was never a possibility, as the old guy said the end of the world was inevitable.

It is heavily implied that if the dream reader would have jumped into the lake the second switch would have gone back to the originary position and he would have continued living like he did before the shuffling.

Okay, so what is the meaning of the shadow leaving the end of the world? And why the dream reader decides to stay?

Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world